Colony by Benjamin Cross (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📗

one from the rock. It was unlike any ceramic he had ever seen before: fine and delicate with a nobbled outer surface. He placed it back down. Whatever these items represented, there was little doubt that both the dead bird and the pottery had originally been within the sack, perhaps forming part of some magical shamanic rite.

After carefully examining a couple more of the shards, his attention moved back to the mummy. He inspected the frozen flesh of the thighs once again. His heart raced with excitement. Desiccation of the most vulnerable outer soft tissues was virtually nil. Jonas had been right after all. Where there are reindeer, there are reindeer hunters.

He brought the dim glow of the torchlight back down over the severed leg bones.

“And reindeer hunter hunters,” he whispered.

4

At sixty-six years of age Doctor Semyonov was finding Harmsworth a challenge. The helicopter had set him and his guide down on the plateau overlooking the cliffs at Svayataya Point earlier that morning. He had then spent the last couple of hours slipping around on scree, battling his way through marsh and scaling deceptively steep inclines on his way to the Hjalmar Ridge. The whole damn thing had looked a lot simpler from the air.

He sneaked a couple of fingers up below his jaw and checked his pulse. It was rapid, but no more so than he’d expect for a man of his age clambering around in the wild. Truth was, he’d had no option but to keep his angina a secret. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he would have qualified for such a remote research posting if he’d declared it. And it was nothing serious. The whole thing had been a massive over-reaction. The occasional and really very mild chest pain was a holiday compared to his wife’s nagging about it, her conviction that he was going to drop dead suddenly and leave her a widow. It was all nonsense. He felt perfectly fine. Even so, he dropped his fingers from his neck to his top pocket, where they found the comforting bulge of the small sublingual nitro-glycerine canister, issued to him in case of an acute attack.

Over the last fortnight Semyonov had spent the majority of his time quite happily in his laboratory, determining the index properties of old rock core samples. These had been extracted, somewhat more crudely than he would have liked, by the previous prospection team. In due course he would need them for comparison with the sixty scientific samples he was to take himself over the next two seasons. In the interim, having given the outside temperature time to achieve its yearly maximum, the moment had been ripe for the first of his field observations.

So far that day there had been no great surprises. The whole island appeared to be formed of successive tiers of basalt. Now that the majority of the ice cover had melted – an oddly accelerated process which he had observed with some interest through the safety of his laboratory portholes – Semyonov could confirm that they were Jurassic to Tertiary in age, with a handful of late Triassic strata outcropping in places. Much to his dismay, Doctor Lee’s prediction that the majority of the sediments would be late Cretaceous was also confirmed. Still, it had obviously just been a lucky guess on the part of that infuriating know-it-all Canadian bitch.

“This way,” he called to the Dolgan security guide following behind. The man’s rifle looked comical against his tiny frame, and he was made to seem all the smaller by the size of the doctor’s rucksack. Semyonov snorted away the guilt that this inspired. There was too much western-minded liberality displayed towards Dolgans and Nenets and the like these days. He certainly felt no remorse for his opinion that they were still little better than cannibals. They were a pain in the Federation’s arse with their determination for unjustifiable equality; though, in fairness, they would always be more tolerable than the blacks.

As the two men approached the base of the ridge, the gradient increased once more and the land bucked itself into a series of steep foothills. Semyonov smiled at the sight of the ice-capped crags towering beyond. Already he could make out the first of the caves, its gaping mouth navigating him across the melt-water marsh. An hour later, he was standing beside it, perspiring heavily and peering into the darkness.

The guide chirruped away, entirely unhelpfully, about the likelihood of bears. But Semyonov ignored him and fumbled open the backpack on his shoulders to retrieve his headlamp. Speleology – cave exploration, as it was known to the ignorant – wasn’t strictly a part of his assessment scope. But nobody would give a damn after he had proven once and for all that there was a convenient, easily extractable source of geothermal energy on Harmsworth. G&S would save millions, the world would have one less coal-fired plant to fret about and he himself would be wallowing in acclaim.

He handed the protesting Dolgan a second headlamp and led the way.

Semyonov estimated the cave to be thirty metres across by eight or so high in places. It was probably a relict littoral cave, the result of wave action on an ancient shoreline. And it was likely to be extensive. Other examples that he had visited in Norway had reached lengths of over three hundred metres, and they were labyrinthine in their complexity.

As his eyes adjusted, Semyonov could see that roof collapse had left dollops of rock scattered widely. The floor was uneven with rifts, channels, pools and spreads of stone. Moisture dripped from the ceiling and patted off his jacket. The sound was eerie and annoying. But it wasn’t half as distracting as the stench. The reek was incomparable.

“What is that?” he asked, his moustache wrinkling in disgust.

“I do not know,” came the reply. “It is like the guts of a whale.”

Semyonov had never had the misfortune, but he was unsurprised that the Dolgan had, and the description seemed very